In Turkey, the broadband fair usage policy was one of the most critical barriers that was kind of slowing down the penetration of OTT services.

If one’s broadband consumption per month is above a certain limit (typically 50 GBytes) then the fair usage policy is becoming active and the bandwidth is limited by 3 Mbps no matter to what broadband package you are subscribed to. (Please see below picture) The notification of TT seen below could be translated as: “As you exceeded the monthly fair usage threshold your broadband speed is updated as 3 Mbps on the remaining days of the month. Starting from the beginning of next month your broadband speed will be set based on your subscription package.”

Due to this limitation, it was quite challenging to secure the QoE on OTT service. Also, reaching to the fair usage threshold is just a matter of days if you watch Live TV channels through internet. This has discouraged service provider in Turkey to offer OTT box type of solutions like Now TV in UK.

Fortunately, the fair usage policy is changing this year. According to the BTK’s new regulation starting from 1st of May 2017, the broadband speed after fair usage quota will be adjusted based on one’s original speed. Also, consumption from 2 AM to 8 AM will be out of scope for fair usage quota limitation. Regarding the table below, if one’s broadband bandwidth subscription is from 16 Mbps to 24 Mbps the speed will be set to 8 Mbps instead of 3 Mbps after the fair usage threshold.

I think this is really a key step forward for OTT services. The consumers of OTT services shouldn’t be worrying if they are off-limits as the limited speed is quite still sufficient for typical use cases.